As an entrepreneur, Steve Jobs' contributions to technology were legendary. As a philanthropist, the billionaire's contributions to society have been called into question.

Few records exist of Jobs' charitable contributions,
according to the International Business Times. The 43rd-richest person in the United States, Jobs, who died last week after a struggle with pancreatic cancer, accumulated a fortune of an estimated $8.3 billion.

Unlike peers in the technology business like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, Jobs did not sign Warren Buffet's
Giving Pledge, which challenged the world's richest billionaires to give at least half their wealth to charity. In the 1980s, Jobs started up the Steven P. Jobs Foundation only to close it down a little over a year later. In recent years, friends told the New York Times Jobs felt he could do more good expanding Apple than giving money to charity.

"The lack of public philanthropy by Mr. Jobs — long whispered about, but rarely said aloud — raises some important questions about the way the public views business and business people at a time when some 'millionaires and billionaires' are criticized for not giving back enough while others like Mr. Jobs are lionized," Andrew Ross Sorkin
wrote in the New York Times
shortly after the Apple CEO stepped down in August.

Some have called Jobs out.

"It's high time the minimalist CEO became a magnanimous philanthropist,"
Change.orgurged in 2010. "As the 43rd-richest person in the United States, Jobs is a prime target for Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge."

Others gave him the benefit of the doubt.

"Of course, Jobs and his wife may be giving enormous sums of money to charity anonymously,"
wrote Leander Kahney
of Wired.com. "For a person as private as Jobs, who shuns any publicity about his family life, this seems credible. If so, however, this would make Jobs virtually unique among moguls."

Jobs' apparent lack of giving is surprising considering the lack of emphasis he placed on money, Sorkin
wrote.

"You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it's humorous, all the attention to it, because it's hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that's happened to me," Jobs said in a 1985 interview with Playboy magazine.

Elizabeth Stuart is an enterprise writer for the Deseret News. Reporting on topics ranging from poverty to incarceration, she seeks to shed light on the trials and triumphs of disadvantaged populations and those who work
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